The assignment for this week included adding XY points and geocoding. I really found the first portion of this weeks lab assignment helpful. I had never carried out the type of operations in Excel that were demonstrated. I always had a fear of dealing with large amounts of data in Excel and now I know what to do to streamlining the data in order to use in a GIS. 

The second part of the lab dealt with geocoding. Geocoding addresses of schools in Brevard County Florida turned out to be a very tedious operation. Slight errors in data or out date information meant that I had to do some research and assign locations to some addresses manually. Choosing locations on a map is not ideal particularly if you are not familiar with the area. I did enjoy creating a web map on ArcGIS Online. The simplicity and custom options available for web maps makes them fun to work with. Link to my web map of geolocated schools in Brevard County:  https://arcg.is/18PeOO

 This week's assignment dealt with analyzing and manipulating vectors. This was a challenging assignment as we had to experiment with various geoprocessing tools to query, join and cut certain features. The most difficult process was replicating the results of a Union by using a different analysis tool. I eventually got the same results as the Union tool, but I had to try a few different things and search for the results I needed.

The resulting map from this week module looks a bit busy to me. The roads and river features seem to scattered randomly across the map frame. It would have been nice if the road layer would have road names to display. Without the road names a person using the map could be easily confused by all the lines if they are not very familiar with the area. After reading the feedback on my previous assignments I tried to reduce the amount of whitespace on my page. Filling the entire sheet is not something I am used to. The data provided did not fill an entire frame nicely no matter what page orientation I used. I had to use some elements such as the north arrow to fill some open space within the map frame.

 This weeks post is related to Module 3 assignments. The first part of Module 3 required the creation of a geodatabase and associated features that could be uploaded to ArcGIS Online to use in the ESRI Collector app. I enjoyed this portion of Module 3 as I am constantly creating content for online maps and data collection with Collector at work. This assignment was the first time I completed all the steps to necessary within ArcGIS Pro. I thought the process of preparing data for use in collector was slightly easier in ArcGIS Pro then it is in Arcmap. I am a big fan of the Collector app so this assignment was fun for me. 

The second part of Module 3 dealt with different projections. This portion of the assignment was a little tedious but it covered some important topics. It was interesting to see how much impact the projection had when calculating the areas of the subject counties. The three projections we used were fairly close but it would have been interesting to see what the variation is spatially if you could stack the different projected areas on top of each other. The map I made of the three projections is a bit plain but I did like how easy it is to insert a table from excel into a map.